Prem Sahib’s Sonic Reckoning with Anti-Immigration Speech

A few weeks after the UK General Election in July, I sat in the library, staring over a stranger’s shoulder as he watched a video of the Conservative Party MP Suella Braverman. Devoid of her voice, Braverman appeared almost amiable in the footage, making it easy to forget the damaging rhetoric she espoused while in office. At a conference in 2022, for instance, she described it as her ‘dream’ to send those seeking asylum in the UK to Rwanda – a controversial deportation policy peddled by the previous government.

Prem Sahib’s unnerving performance for Edinburgh Art Festival, Alleus (2024), doesn’t risk creating the same ameliorating effect for Braverman. The artist takes a recording of the former home secretary’s incendiary speech on the Illegal Migration Bill (2023), booming and warping it through speakers into Edinburgh’s Castle Terrace Car Park. There’s no mistaking whose familiar voice this is, no hiding from her sentiments. Speaking alongside and on top of this audio recording are three young performers, all dressed in black, standing at the base of a spiral stairwell. The pre-recorded Braverman speech cuts out at points and the performers read her words instead. In the first few minutes, they lend their voices whenever she says, ‘the British people’. Later, the performers talk over one another to parrot the politician’s claim that illegal migration has ‘overwhelmed our asylum system’ and recite passages about ‘stop[ping] the boats’.

Alongside these moments when Braverman’s words fall out of other people’s mouths, the original audio itself is slowed down and sped up – sonic manipulation lending a trippy, uncanny atmosphere to the work. The performers lean into this chaos, reading parts of the script in a high-pitched Minnie Mouse voice, making hissing noises and repeating certain words in mock incantation. Eventually, the volume ramps up into a piercing scream – at which point the woman beside me put her fingers in her ears, trying to block out the ear-splitting sound. By making Braverman’s speech unbearable to listen to in this way, Sahib maps out just how politically intolerable and intolerant her words are; stripping away the veneer of respectability, he makes the politician sound as weird as the things she’s saying. It works, revealing the monstrosity of her speech, but it also poses a question: why were we able to listen to her for so long? 

Much is made here of reversal, with large sections of the performance playing Braverman’s speech backwards, its words turned into a nonsensical slush of noise. A parody of her own desire to ‘send back’ migrants, this device risks being a flat stunt, but is grounded by the layering of live performance over the recording, a complex soundscape emerging from the simple act of reversal. Other aspects of the performance are not so successful: orange lighting and a fog machine feel like little more than stock set dressings, failing to make much of an impact before the fog is dragged, vortex-like, into the Edinburgh sky.

Sahib’s greatest trick, however, is to make the audience part of the work, by positioning spectators on the steps of the spiral staircase overlooking the performance. Attendance might seem like a particular type of virtue-signalling, an abnegation of responsibility that allows us to think: ‘We’re witnesses, not part of the problem.’ To counter this, Sahib implicates the audience within the soundscape by making us constantly visible to one another. Braverman may have been sent to the opposition benches in the recent general election, but her rhetoric, resurrected and reshaped, persists. Alleus serves as a full-throated warning against complacency.

The Scottish premiere of Alleus was commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival and the Roberts Institute of Art. It was originally co-commissioned by the Roberts Institute of Art and Somerset House Studios, London. 

^{Main image: Prem Sahib, Alleus, 2024, performance documentation. Courtesy: Edinburgh Art Festival; photography: Charlotte Cullen}